| The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie |
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Agatha Christie wrote some 80 mysteries,
which have sold a staggering four billion
copies—putting her alongside Shakespeare
and behind only the Bible in readership.
But Christie could also
live a mystery of her
own—the experts will
forever speculate about
the story behind her
mysterious disappear-
ance in December
1926, spurring a mas-
sive manhunt until her
discovery, living under
an assumed name in
Yorkshire, eleven days later. Explanations
run the gamut from amnesia to a publicity
stunt, or even a set-up to get her
philandering husband arrested on murder
charges. Certainly art and artifice
overlapped in the life of this grand lady of
the detective genre. She learned about
poisons by working in a pharmacy, and
about wounds of various sort as a nurse
during World War I. And she could be as
unreliable a witness as any in her books—
one of her tall tales, told to a credulous
interviewer, was that she didn't know who
the culprit in her stories would be until she
started writing the final chapter. On
another occasion she recommended washing
dishes as a good way to come up with an
idea for a book. Not the sentimental type,
she killed off both of her star sleuths, Miss
Marple and Hercule Poirot, the latter
receiving the unprecedented honor of being
the only fictional character to receive an
obituary in The New York Times (with the
headline "Hercule Poirot is Dead; Famed
Belgian Detective"). A teetotaler and a non-
smoker, Christie would eventually gain great
respectability as a Dame Commander of the
Order of the British Empire—which made
her Dame Agatha Christie; but remember
that this same lady who averred that "very
few of us are what we seem."
which have sold a staggering four billion
copies—putting her alongside Shakespeare
and behind only the Bible in readership.
But Christie could also
live a mystery of her
own—the experts will
forever speculate about
the story behind her
mysterious disappear-
ance in December
1926, spurring a mas-
sive manhunt until her
discovery, living under
an assumed name in
Yorkshire, eleven days later. Explanations
run the gamut from amnesia to a publicity
stunt, or even a set-up to get her
philandering husband arrested on murder
charges. Certainly art and artifice
overlapped in the life of this grand lady of
the detective genre. She learned about
poisons by working in a pharmacy, and
about wounds of various sort as a nurse
during World War I. And she could be as
unreliable a witness as any in her books—
one of her tall tales, told to a credulous
interviewer, was that she didn't know who
the culprit in her stories would be until she
started writing the final chapter. On
another occasion she recommended washing
dishes as a good way to come up with an
idea for a book. Not the sentimental type,
she killed off both of her star sleuths, Miss
Marple and Hercule Poirot, the latter
receiving the unprecedented honor of being
the only fictional character to receive an
obituary in The New York Times (with the
headline "Hercule Poirot is Dead; Famed
Belgian Detective"). A teetotaler and a non-
smoker, Christie would eventually gain great
respectability as a Dame Commander of the
Order of the British Empire—which made
her Dame Agatha Christie; but remember
that this same lady who averred that "very
few of us are what we seem."
| ROGUES GALLERY: AGATHA CHRISTIE |
Further Clues:
The Official Agatha Christie Website
Agatha Christie: The BBC Interviews
All About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Disappearance
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
In the postmodern mystery, the detective often
seems more interested in deconstructing documents
than solving crimes. So deeply has the linguistic turn
in academia permeated these books, that semiotics
trumps criminology time and again, and fingerprints
and bloodstains are rudely ignored in favor of
explication de texte.
Fans of more traditional mysteries
may prefer to blame Auster or Eco
for this inward turn, which risks
reducing murder most foul into
one more esoteric graduate seminar.
But an obsession with texts and
symbols has been part of the genre
from the very start. Recall that
Edgar Allan Poe, often lauded as
the inventor of the detective story,
focused one of his most famous
tales on the pursuit of a purloined
letter—no bloody death to investi-
gate, merely a text to hunt down—and built his classic
tale "The Gold Bug" on the deciphering of an intricately
coded discourse. Arthur Conan Doyle followed in the
same steps with "The Adventure of the Dancing Men,"
in which Sherlock Holmes takes on the role of the
codebreaker, and a host of later mystery authors have
similarly built stories around the interpretation of
troubling documents.
Yet any account of the role of symbols and texts in the
detective genre must give a prominent place to Agatha
Christie's The A.B.C. Murders. Here not just the clues
but the very crime itself is driven by a linguistic game.
The victims and the locations of the crime follow an
alphabetical sequence, with no apparent motivation
beyond a deadly insistence on what Saussure would call
"the arbitrary nature of the sign."
The first crime is announced in advance via a letter to
Ms. Christie’s most celebrated sleuth.
Mr. Hercule Poirot—You fancy yourself, don’t you, at solving
mysteries that are too difficult for our poor thick-headed British
police? Let us see, Mr. Clever Poirot, just how clever you can be.
Perhaps you’ll find this nut too hard to crack. Look out for
Andover on the 21st of the month.
Yours, etc.,
A.B.C.
Needless to say, a murder takes place at Andover in the
early hours of the 21st, and the victim is named Alice
Ascher. In time, another letter arrives anticipating the
next crime: the killing of Betty Barnard of Bexhill-on-
Sea. And so on and so forth. If Poirot doesn’t solve this
mystery, the A.B.C. murderer may very well knock off
26 people in 26 different locations. ("You'll have him by
the heels long before that," remarks one of the
investigators; "interesting to know how he'd have dealt
with the letter X.")
The premise is a striking one, and Christie’s
unconventional serial killer could serve, without further
postmodern twists, as the centerpiece for a gripping
mystery. But our author risks undermining the suspense
of her tale by introducing us to Mr. A.B.C. himself
almost at the outset of the novel and periodically
throughout the book’s duration. With a jarring
dislocation from the first-person narrative by Captain
Hastings, Poirot’s Dr. Watson, Christie offers updates on
Alexander Bonaparte Cust as he travels to various crime
scenes where the alphabetical murders take place,
sometimes leaving behind incriminating evidence.
This is a strange, disruptive technique, but Christie was
never afraid of adopting avant-garde approaches to the
detective genre. She would constantly befuddle her
readers with unreliable narrators, criminals who escape
justice, a murder in which all of the suspects were guilty,
a crime in which the culprit is one of the victims, and
other unexpected deviations from the accepted formulas
for such tales. In works such as The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd, Murder in the Calais Coach and The A.B.C. Murders,
Christie turned the usually narrowly focused mystery
story into a playground for unconventional techniques
and rampant rule-breaking of the very genre constraints
that she had helped establish during the course of her
career.
In The A.B.C. Murders, Christie even pokes fun at
herself. Early on in the story, she includes a discussion
between Poirot and Hastings in which they laugh at the
predictable ingredients in the very books in which they
appear. At moments such as these, Christie is not far
afield from Gilbert Sorrentino, who enlivened his
Mulligan Stew with a gripe session where characters
complain about the lousy novels they inhabit.
"If you could order a crime as one orders dinner what
would you choose?"
"Robbery, forgery. I think not….It must be murder—red-
blooded murder—with trimmings, of course….Who
shall the victim be—man or woman? Man, I think. Some
bigwig. American millionaire. Prime Minister.
Newspaper proprietor. Scene of the crime—well, what’s
wrong with the good old library? Nothing like it for
atmosphere. As for the weapon—well, it might be
curiously twisted dagger—or some blunt instrument—a
carved stone idol…."
And Christie continues in this vein for another page,
listing likely suspects in this imaginary mystery,
suggesting false clues and providing, in her own words,
"a very pretty resume of nearly all the detective stories
that have ever been written."
There are a few sloppy moments here, as is inevitable in
an author who maintained such extraordinary
productivity over so many years. At one point we are
told that our criminal is not just your usual killer, but a
"homicidal murderer"—as if there is any other kind?—
and elsewhere we have implausible circumstances, such
as a man getting stabbed in a public place without
flinching or making a cry. And the final denouement is
to plots what Rube Goldberg is to technology.
But you don’t go to Agatha Christie seeking Proustian
prose or Balzac’s realism. Her aim is to entice and
puzzle us, and she delivers on those counts, presenting
her readers with a story that is radically different from
the norm, and proving that an author who left behind
some eighty detective novels—roughly five million
words of whodunits—could always dig into her toolbox
and come up with something fresh and different, yet as
simple as A.B.C.
Ted Gioia's latest book is The Birth (and Death) of
the Cool.
In the postmodern mystery, the detective often
seems more interested in deconstructing documents
than solving crimes. So deeply has the linguistic turn
in academia permeated these books, that semiotics
trumps criminology time and again, and fingerprints
and bloodstains are rudely ignored in favor of
explication de texte.
Fans of more traditional mysteries
may prefer to blame Auster or Eco
for this inward turn, which risks
reducing murder most foul into
one more esoteric graduate seminar.
But an obsession with texts and
symbols has been part of the genre
from the very start. Recall that
Edgar Allan Poe, often lauded as
the inventor of the detective story,
focused one of his most famous
tales on the pursuit of a purloined
letter—no bloody death to investi-
gate, merely a text to hunt down—and built his classic
tale "The Gold Bug" on the deciphering of an intricately
coded discourse. Arthur Conan Doyle followed in the
same steps with "The Adventure of the Dancing Men,"
in which Sherlock Holmes takes on the role of the
codebreaker, and a host of later mystery authors have
similarly built stories around the interpretation of
troubling documents.
Yet any account of the role of symbols and texts in the
detective genre must give a prominent place to Agatha
Christie's The A.B.C. Murders. Here not just the clues
but the very crime itself is driven by a linguistic game.
The victims and the locations of the crime follow an
alphabetical sequence, with no apparent motivation
beyond a deadly insistence on what Saussure would call
"the arbitrary nature of the sign."
The first crime is announced in advance via a letter to
Ms. Christie’s most celebrated sleuth.
Mr. Hercule Poirot—You fancy yourself, don’t you, at solving
mysteries that are too difficult for our poor thick-headed British
police? Let us see, Mr. Clever Poirot, just how clever you can be.
Perhaps you’ll find this nut too hard to crack. Look out for
Andover on the 21st of the month.
Yours, etc.,
A.B.C.
Needless to say, a murder takes place at Andover in the
early hours of the 21st, and the victim is named Alice
Ascher. In time, another letter arrives anticipating the
next crime: the killing of Betty Barnard of Bexhill-on-
Sea. And so on and so forth. If Poirot doesn’t solve this
mystery, the A.B.C. murderer may very well knock off
26 people in 26 different locations. ("You'll have him by
the heels long before that," remarks one of the
investigators; "interesting to know how he'd have dealt
with the letter X.")
The premise is a striking one, and Christie’s
unconventional serial killer could serve, without further
postmodern twists, as the centerpiece for a gripping
mystery. But our author risks undermining the suspense
of her tale by introducing us to Mr. A.B.C. himself
almost at the outset of the novel and periodically
throughout the book’s duration. With a jarring
dislocation from the first-person narrative by Captain
Hastings, Poirot’s Dr. Watson, Christie offers updates on
Alexander Bonaparte Cust as he travels to various crime
scenes where the alphabetical murders take place,
sometimes leaving behind incriminating evidence.
This is a strange, disruptive technique, but Christie was
never afraid of adopting avant-garde approaches to the
detective genre. She would constantly befuddle her
readers with unreliable narrators, criminals who escape
justice, a murder in which all of the suspects were guilty,
a crime in which the culprit is one of the victims, and
other unexpected deviations from the accepted formulas
for such tales. In works such as The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd, Murder in the Calais Coach and The A.B.C. Murders,
Christie turned the usually narrowly focused mystery
story into a playground for unconventional techniques
and rampant rule-breaking of the very genre constraints
that she had helped establish during the course of her
career.
In The A.B.C. Murders, Christie even pokes fun at
herself. Early on in the story, she includes a discussion
between Poirot and Hastings in which they laugh at the
predictable ingredients in the very books in which they
appear. At moments such as these, Christie is not far
afield from Gilbert Sorrentino, who enlivened his
Mulligan Stew with a gripe session where characters
complain about the lousy novels they inhabit.
"If you could order a crime as one orders dinner what
would you choose?"
"Robbery, forgery. I think not….It must be murder—red-
blooded murder—with trimmings, of course….Who
shall the victim be—man or woman? Man, I think. Some
bigwig. American millionaire. Prime Minister.
Newspaper proprietor. Scene of the crime—well, what’s
wrong with the good old library? Nothing like it for
atmosphere. As for the weapon—well, it might be
curiously twisted dagger—or some blunt instrument—a
carved stone idol…."
And Christie continues in this vein for another page,
listing likely suspects in this imaginary mystery,
suggesting false clues and providing, in her own words,
"a very pretty resume of nearly all the detective stories
that have ever been written."
There are a few sloppy moments here, as is inevitable in
an author who maintained such extraordinary
productivity over so many years. At one point we are
told that our criminal is not just your usual killer, but a
"homicidal murderer"—as if there is any other kind?—
and elsewhere we have implausible circumstances, such
as a man getting stabbed in a public place without
flinching or making a cry. And the final denouement is
to plots what Rube Goldberg is to technology.
But you don’t go to Agatha Christie seeking Proustian
prose or Balzac’s realism. Her aim is to entice and
puzzle us, and she delivers on those counts, presenting
her readers with a story that is radically different from
the norm, and proving that an author who left behind
some eighty detective novels—roughly five million
words of whodunits—could always dig into her toolbox
and come up with something fresh and different, yet as
simple as A.B.C.
Ted Gioia's latest book is The Birth (and Death) of
the Cool.
| Click on image to purchase |
| Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedgioia |
Recommended Sites:
Conceptual Fiction
Great Books Guide
The New Canon
Ted Gioia's homepage
Ted Gioia (on Twitter)
American Fiction Notes
The Art of Reading
The Big Read
Blographia Literaria
Books, Inq.
Bookslut
Booksquare
A Commonplace Blog
Conversational Reading
Crimespree Magazine
Critical Mass
Dana Gioia
The Elegant Variation
Fictionaut
In Search of the Classic Mystery
Joseph Peschel
Light Reading
The Literary Saloon
Los Angeles Review of Books
Maud Newton
The Millions
The Misread City
Mystery Fanfare
The Neglected Books Page
Nota Bene Books
Open Letters Monthly
Readerville
The Reading Experience
Reviews and Responses
Tipping My Fedora
Waggish
Conceptual Fiction
Great Books Guide
The New Canon
Ted Gioia's homepage
Ted Gioia (on Twitter)
American Fiction Notes
The Art of Reading
The Big Read
Blographia Literaria
Books, Inq.
Bookslut
Booksquare
A Commonplace Blog
Conversational Reading
Crimespree Magazine
Critical Mass
Dana Gioia
The Elegant Variation
Fictionaut
In Search of the Classic Mystery
Joseph Peschel
Light Reading
The Literary Saloon
Los Angeles Review of Books
Maud Newton
The Millions
The Misread City
Mystery Fanfare
The Neglected Books Page
Nota Bene Books
Open Letters Monthly
Readerville
The Reading Experience
Reviews and Responses
Tipping My Fedora
Waggish